


everything has breath inside

by cryptidgay



Category: Blaseball (Video Game)
Genre: (flowers as in the plants not as in the team. sorry boston), F/F, Flowers, Prompt Fic, Relationship Study, season 4, season 5
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-24
Updated: 2021-01-24
Packaged: 2021-03-16 23:21:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,892
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28964544
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cryptidgay/pseuds/cryptidgay
Summary: There’s a little florist’s shop on the corner of Kennedy’s street.The shop is tiny, so tiny that it bursts to the brim with life; Finn couldn’t hope to name more than a half-dozen of the flowers she sees around her, and there are so much more than that, leafy things potted on shelves and bouquets wrapped up in little bows, cactuses in jars just the right size for a dorm room, vines trailing their way across the walls. It reminds Finn, in a giddy moment of perfect clarity, of the ocean. She spins a slow circle around the middle of the room, and feels as if she is moving underwater again; the air is as clear as the sea is murky, and she’s surrounded on all sides by living things, things she can’t hope to conceptualize the lives of. Like schools of fish gliding past her underwater, the flowers surrounding Finn pay her no mind.
Relationships: Kennedy Loser/Finn James
Comments: 2
Kudos: 13





	everything has breath inside

**Author's Note:**

> this was meant to be one of those 3-sentence prompt fics on tumblr, and then it got... much longer than 3 sentences. written for @919 on tumblr who requested kenfinn + flowers !
> 
> title from there beneath by the oh hellos.
> 
> kennedy loser is a butch lesbian and uses he/him pronouns, finn james is a femme lesbian and uses she/her pronouns, & they're in love.

There’s a little florist’s shop on the corner of Kennedy’s street.

It takes Finn a while to notice it; she emerges from her watery limbo and is immediately off to Breckenridge, then to Miami, and a two day reprieve back in Baltimore before being shuttled to Hades for a grueling 9-day series in which the Crabs win all of one game. By the time Finn gets to spend more than one night in the city of her birth, it’s day ninety, and then it’s the offseason, and then there’s three months stretching ahead of her without games to play. This should, by all rights, not be odd — she went _years_ without playing blaseball, years and years and years with nothing ahead of her but more endless ocean, and the ticking of a distant clock to an uncertain end is familiar to her by now — but doing something every day for a month is enough for it to become a habit, and she finds herself as lost without a bat in her hand as she is lost without the sea weighing her down.

She lives with Kennedy, now, technically. She’d put his address down on her paperwork when they’d gone through all the official business of signing her up for the league, the night after Combs’ death; he’d told her she could stay as long as she wanted, and more than that, that he wanted her to stay. 

If it had only been the obligation Kennedy feels to his team, Finn certainly would have found an apartment of her own by now, or slept at the bottom of the Bay in the time between games — she’d gone so long without a proper bed, why start now? — but she’d been able to see the love there, the way him saying _I want you to stay_ was the same as him saying _I don’t want to be alone,_ and really, when it came down to it, neither did she.

So she sleeps in Kennedy’s bed at night, and during the day she wanders, restless for some sort of epiphany on what she should be _doing,_ now that she’s done drowning and has rediscovered open air. She swims in the harbor, tests how far from the cement-and-metal shores she can go before the sun sets and she has to get back to Kennedy’s for dinner; the water is cold, now, and halfway frozen-over half of the time, but it doesn’t bother her as much as it should. Cold-blooded, she thinks.

And then she swims back to shore, and walks the rest of the way, and by the time she reaches Kennedy’s street, hair dripping baywater, she can breathe a little easier.

***

It’s on the way back from one of these swims that she finds the florist. They’re closing for the day, the old woman in the doorway talking to herself in Spanish; Finn catches a glimpse of bouquets through the window, black-eyed susans and sunflowers and lilies and violets and baby’s breath, and then the shutters go down and the woman is looking at her, head tilted as if to ask a question, and all Finn can think about is that she hasn’t seen flowers since she got back, not really. Too late in the season for them to still be blooming on their own, and undersea plantlife is beautiful in its own way, but, but, but.

“We’re closed,” the old woman says, gently. “Open again tomorrow at noon.”

So Finn walks the rest of the way to Kennedy’s apartment, and has dinner with him, and falls asleep next to him, and wakes up and wanders and swims again.

She makes sure to climb out of the water well before sunset. When she reaches Kennedy’s street, the flowershop is still open, and the same old woman from the day before smiles at her from her chair inside.

"I knew you would come back,” the woman says. She doesn’t seem unnerved by the blue tint to Finn’s skin, the scales that have rippled their way across its surface, the teeth that have grown far sharper and longer than her mouth was built to contain. Finn supposes everyone around here has seen odd things.

The shop is tiny, so tiny that it bursts to the brim with life; Finn couldn’t hope to name more than a half-dozen of the flowers she sees around her, and there are so much _more_ than that, leafy things potted on shelves and bouquets wrapped up in little bows, cactuses in jars just the right size for a dorm room, vines trailing their way across the walls. It reminds Finn, in a giddy moment of perfect clarity, of the ocean. She spins a slow circle around the middle of the room, and feels as if she is moving underwater again; the air is as clear as the sea is murky, and she’s surrounded on all sides by living things, things she can’t hope to conceptualize the lives of. Like schools of fish gliding past her underwater, the flowers surrounding Finn pay her no mind.

“It’s beautiful,” Finn says when she remembers to speak. It could be a minute and it could be an hour and it could be a thousand years, from the time she entered the store until then; but the old woman hasn’t moved to close shop, yet, so she thinks it can’t have been too long.

“What are you looking for?” There’s a twinkle in the woman’s eye that reminds Finn, a bit, of Sutton Dreamy; the way she’d smile on her way up to bat after Finn’s turn, regardless of whether Finn had hit a home run (rare) or struck out instantly (less rare). It’s a look that says _I’m here to help you, let’s get back on track._

“Uh,” Finn says, eloquently. “I’m not sure? I want to buy something for my —” and she realizes, suddenly, that she and Kennedy _still_ haven’t put words to what they are. She kicks herself for it; she had thought herself dead and had regretted never saying anything concrete, anything that _meant_ anything, and here she was, alive again, and still wordless. She’d told him she loves him, and he had said the same back, but _girlfriend_ feels far too little and _wife_ far too much. “ — My partner,” she fills in, eventually, still feeling the word to be wholly inadequate.

“Roses?” The woman brushes past Finn’s floundering, and Finn is grateful for it.

Finn nods. _Why not,_ she thinks.

***

“For you,” Finn says, holding out a vase of blue roses. “I saw a flower shop on my way home, and — I thought you might like them.”

It occurs to her, distantly, that it’s the first time she’s called Kennedy’s apartment _home_ aloud, but she forces the thought to the back of her mind. It feels right, feels true, and that’s what’s important.

“I do,” Kennedy says, smiling; he places the vase on their shared dresser, leans down to kiss Finn on the cheek. “I love them.”

***

As most things do when done every day for a period of time, stopping at the florist’s on her way home becomes a habit. Before long, she’s on a first-name basis with the old woman who runs the place, Ana, and Kennedy’s apartment is filled with vases of roses, daffodils, lavender, carnations; little ceramic pots holding plants that are growing from seeds Ana’d given Finn to try out; boxes in every window.

“They’re beautiful,” Kennedy says, every time she comes home with more. They figure out the best place for each new bouquet together; which ones need more sunlight, which ones less, making sure each of them get enough water. Finn has an awful tendency to overwater all of their plants, but Ken puts sticky notes on each container listing when they should be watered, and that mostly solves her faulty memory.

***

Season five comes quickly. The first three games of the season are in Houston, and Finn is a pitcher now, and technically doesn’t have to be there at all, but she wouldn’t miss the Crabs’ first few games for the world. She’s never experienced early-season excitement before; her entrance to the game was the latter half of the season prior, and the hum of possibility thrums through her.

She tries not to show it. Most blaseball players are long-since disillusioned; whatever joy they’d brought to the game has worn off in the last few seasons. But Finn has only seen one rogue umpire, and has only played a month’s worth of games, and has never _pitched_ a professional game before, and she can’t help but to grin with all her sharpened teeth as the Crabs hit home run after home run.

They end the first game 11-1, and Finn rushes onto the field the moment Fitzgerald Blackburn strikes out, wrapping her arms around Kennedy. “Two home runs!” she cheers. “You were wonderful, Ken!”

“Pedro and Dreamy both got homers, too — three runs, for both of theirs,” Kennedy points out. “It was a team effort.”

“I know,” Finn says. “You were _all_ wonderful. I’m allowed to be especially proud of the woman I love, y’know.”

It’s so easy to make Kennedy blush, and still, it gives Finn boundless amounts of joy whenever it happens.

***

The Spies politely decline the Crabs’ invitation to party with them after the game. Finn thinks this is understandable; they _did_ just get their asses thoroughly kicked, after all, and have to be ready to do it again tomorrow. Neither Finn nor Kennedy are the type for parties anymore, but still they follow the rest of the Crabs to some dive bar Tillman _swears_ is good — and Finn isn’t quite sure why they all trust Tillman’s taste at all, but they do, and so she does, too. 

She and Ken stay for an hour, and then Kennedy puts out his standard offer to call an Ubler for anyone who wants one, though the hotel is only a few blocks away. A few Crabs take him up on the offer, and Pedro promises to stick around to get the rest home safe.

By the time they reach the hotel lobby, Kennedy and Finn are both exhausted — but it’s the good kind of exhausted, the kind that comes from spending a day in the sun with people you love, then walking home in the brisk night air with the person you love, then leaning against each other in comfortable silence on the elevator ride up to the Crabs’ rooms. Kennedy’d stopped at the hotel earlier in the day to make sure everything was in order; he digs the keycard out of his pocket, and only takes a few tries to unlock the door successfully.

When it opens, Finn sees that the room is filled with flowers.

“Ken,” she says, joy and awe and disbelief mixing into the edges of her voice, “when did you do this?”

“Before the game,” Kennedy says. “I, uh. Stopped in here to put everyone’s luggage away, and — I thought it’d be nice for it to feel like home? Didn’t realize how blank hotel rooms would feel, now, so.”

Finn picks up a daisy between her fingertips, tucks it behind one of Ken’s ears. It tangles itself into his curls immediately, and Finn smiles.

Kennedy was right. It does feel like home. But Finn thinks anywhere would, with him.

**Author's Note:**

> thanks for reading! hmu on tumblr at rogueumpire or twitter at eviljaylen, or in the crabitat discord server! leave a comment if you liked it!


End file.
